With Cats

As per the previous blog entry, this is from my catching up on an old "New Yorker" magazine from Jan. 13. The premise of this "Shouts & Murmurs" column, entitled "'Downton Abbey' With Cats," is: "Look, I never want to tell stories about my children, because it always seems a little lazy. Children tend to be sort of dumb, and, in the end, the stories are always the same: children say hilarious things, and I am old and dying. So when I tell you these stories about my children let's just pretend they are about my cats."

The schtick goes on for a page, but the insight at the end is what got me:

"Downton Abbey" and "Upstairs, Downstairs" are the same thing. They are the exact same television show: about an aristocratic family living through the early twentieth century, their lives entwined with those of a plucky, makeshift family of servants below them.... And it made me understand: no matter what you do or make in life, it will be forgotten. And then people will just make it again and pretend that what you did never happened.

Social Pathology

Catching up on old "New Yorker" magazines, have been reading the last leftover from months ago, from Jan. 13. Specifically an article called "The People Who Pass," about the "Roma problem" in France. By "problem," I mean that a small percentage of the country's population is causing a disproportionately large percent of the crime. And even the liberal French are starting to get sick of it.

The writer, Adam Gopnik, interviews many Roma representatives who bitch that "France is the worst place for Roma to be born" (!) and "Nobody should try to integrate himself into a society that is entirely sick" and "We are no longer even allowed to claim the right to wander that we have always had. That is the essence of our history. Why should we integrate?" And then there's the cause celebre of the left in France of "little Leonarda," a Roma girl who was, with her family, ejected from the country when it was discovered that they were all there illegally.

OK. So far, so knee-jerkedly, frustratingly illogical. But then, thankfully, the article also fairly explores the other side. Starting with noting a French "respectable weekly" publishing a cover story on "The Roma Overdose," outlining "all 'the things we're not allowed to say'--that the Roma are a public burden and a social nuisance."

Gopnik also quotes France's Socialist Interior Minister (today Prime Minister), Manuel Valls (whose parents were also refugees to France, from Spain): "The Roma should return to Romania or Bulgaria...Our role is not to welcome all the world's misery." Valls also says: "France has been a country of immigration for a long time...and that's been France's good fortune. But the idea of integration remains distinct here, where each keeps his identity but shares in a set of common values: secularism, the idea of the Republic, the rights of women, the language...That's the French model, and it remains strong... I'm naturalized, I was born in Spain, and I think it's fantastic that you can be born elsewhere and become a citizen of this country, and then that I can become Minister of the Interior, just as a Moroccan-born citizen can become Minister for Women's Rights. Those are my politics. Firm, balanced, respectful of persons and of the law. A policy that integrates by naturalization, following rules that are clear and transparent, where people understand why they're legalized, or not, and why some must be sent back to the border... If there are no rules, it is always the weakest that suffer. As a man of the left, I find this essential. For me, respect for law is completely linked with our ideas of humanity and generosity. I reject the idea that order and democracy can't go together, that firmness and generosity aren't compatible. We must have both."

Says the article: "Valls supporters thought that the sentimental cult of Leonarda was a form of 'angelism'--meaning a refusal to face unpleasant realities, in this case the truth about the self-evident (if historically rooted) pathologies of an underclass. They insist...that this 'angelism' is part of a larger, enforced cult of the 'Other,' a compulsory act of celebrating difference that is undermining the French state, so that defenders of little Leonarda insist on embracing the Other, even as the Other picks their pockets."

And the article again, from the liberal standpoint (yet with a starting point of reality): "Recognizing that a social pathology persists within a minority group is not the same thing as imagining that the social pathology is natural to the minority group." I completely agree with this. Yet... here in America, no one seems to want to publicly ADMIT that there IS a "social pathology persisting within a minority group."

This article COMPLETELY describes what's going on in America, albeit in a roundabout way, filtered through the current Roma/French experience. But where's our humane truth-teller Valls or our version of "The Roma Overdose" in the mainstream media? This blind political correctness can't continue.

Maleficent

About 15 years ago, I first became aware of Angelina Jolie and saw her in "Gia" and "Girl, Interrupted." I thought these two performances were mildly moving, nothing profound. (It's easy to "play crazy and/or drug-addled.") What was even more interesting to me at the time was her public persona: Deep-kissing her brother, giving an interview while all sexed-up after intercourse with Billy Bob Thornton in their limo. She was, indeed, interesting: bordering on train-wreckish, but also very bold and daring.

Since then, she's apparently calmed down, and I haven't seen another performance of hers, other than the public media pronouncements about her "stealing" Brad Pitt, and the multiple kid adoptions, and her double mastectomy. YAWN. I can't think of three things that are less inspiring to me than (1) winning Brad Pitt, (2) adopting a bunch of kids, or (3) getting a double mastectomy when you don't even have cancer just 'cause you're paranoid about possibly getting cancer in the future.

With all the current publicity about "Maleficent," though... OK, so Jolie was initially interesting to me because of her "dark side." And I've always been interested in psychologically dark women. But then it's kind of trendy recently to do "The Madwoman in the Attic" and "Wicked" and such. And I hate "summer blockbusters from Disney"-- surely anything psychologically profound about the concept of the Evil Queen is going to be dumbed down.

Reviews I started reading about "Maleficent" initially confirmed my doubts. The fact that Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" hated it was all over the web. So I had to go to the RS site to read what Travers had to say. And there I came upon this cogent response to Travers by reader Amy Luna Manderino, which is now also getting much attention:

Let me translate Travers' review for those of you who like a bit of objectivity and depth in your movie reviews...

"classic evil b*tch"
translation: I only see characters in terms of their gender tropes.

"soulless" "untouched by human hands" "empty inside"
translation: I am too numb to recognize that this is the deeply profound story of anyone (male or female) being physically violated and emotionally betrayed by someone in whom they placed their deepest love and trust and the healing journey back from that devastation to conquer the inner urge to become evil yourself."

"The idea..is that Maleficent is really a secret softie."
translation: I am too obtuse to realize that the idea is that people are complex and nuanced, sometimes Princes (or Princesses) turn into Frogs and Villians turn into Heroes and we shouldn't be quick to judge the..uh…what was that term?…oh yes…the "evil b*tches" of the world.

"She's been done wrong...Men-those rat b*stards!"
translation: I'm too defensive to realize that any person, male or female who displays psychopathic values above their humanity is a rat b*stard but it's also true that socialized masculine culture normalizes psychopathic values over humanity and that pointing this out helps women AND men.

"three incompetent pixies"
translation: I'm so used to the same old five female tropes in my films that I didn't pick up on the passive-aggressive codependent mother role the pixies were meant to deliberately symbolize in contrast to Jolie's true and unconditional mother love for Aurora.

"Aurora is ready to join her spirit mom Maleficent in revenge against Big Daddy."
translation: I so wanted to hate the b*tches in this film that I didn't even notice that Aurora were and Maleficent were simply TRYING TO LEAVE THE CASTLE (not extract revenge) when they were ATTACKED. And that, in the end, Maleficent does NOT take her revenge when she can.

"The twink of a prince is little more than an afterthought."
translation: I am so used to the entitled male tropes in films that I can't wrap my brain around the idea that a significant other can be one of many aspects of life that a man or woman indulges in and loves and that doesn't make them an AFTERthought, it makes them an ALSOthought.

"Even the true love's kiss that can awaken Aurora takes a feminist slant."
translation: Any love that doesn't involve sex between a man and a woman is "feminist."

"Maleficent is still one long, laborious slog."
translation: This movie is way ahead of my ability to comprehend its beauty, subtly and innovative universal themes on the human condition.

Rolling Stone, it's time to get a new movie critic. The world is passing Travers by in leaps and bounds.

Holy fuck and amen, Amy Luna! :)  And I haven't even SEEN the film. But now I certainly WANT to! Closing the deal (re my indecision about seeing this movie) was this excerpt by Matt Zoller Seitz on the rogerebert.com site:

The scene of Maleficent waking up on a hilltop with huge scars in her back, then weeping with rage, is the most traumatizing image I've seen in a Hollywood fairy tale since the Christ-like sacrifice of Aslan in 2005's "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." It strikes so deep, and its impact resonates for so long after, that it makes the film's numerous missteps seem less like deal breakers than irritants. The assault transforms Maleficent from an unabashed heroine into an anti-heroine—a straight-up bad guy, as far as the story's terrified humans are concerned—and warps Disney's vanilla 1959 film into a conflicted revenge story with an unmistakable feminist undertone. It's the deepest betrayal imaginable. Every subsequent action Maleficent takes—including casting a spell on Stefan's daughter Aurora (played as a teen by Elle Fanning) that will send her into a coma at age 16 after a finger-prick by a spinning wheel needle—is driven by the trauma of that betrayal.

 

Paul McCartney poem excerpts

Old loves return
To kiss the lips
In case the empty gallery
Should fill with whispering strangers
Like a flood

--------------------------------------------

Blessed

I would come back from a run
With lines of poetry to tell
And having listened, she would say
"What a mind."

She'd fold my words inside her head
And though the lines may not have been
Supreme, she wasn't merely being kind
She meant it, what she said

And I am blessed
For she said "What a mind."

Bus-learnin'

A 20-year-old hipster was instructing his girlfriend on the bus this afternoon, and I got to benefit! I first tuned in when the boy was mentioning Pearl Jam's re-make of 1961's "Last Kiss." Did the girl know that "the '60s" had a genre wherein the singer's boy- or girlfriend died tragically? (No, she did not: "Really!? Wow...")

OK, so there really WAS said "teen tragedy genre," albeit in the late '50s/early '60s more than "the '60s" ("Teen Angel," '59; "Leader of the Pack" '64, etc.)... I'll cut the little nerdy bugger some show-offy slack. But then he went on about Pearl Jam, et al....

"I really can't STAND those '80s bands: Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young --- I hate all of those guys. They're so way overrated." (Girl: "Really.")

Really, he gave as examples of "'80s bands" Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young.

Beautiful Night (Paul McCartney, 1997)

"I won't need a castle, they've got castles in Versailles..."

It took me about 10 listens to fall in love with this beautiful song.



Someone's gone out fishing, someone's high and dry
Someone's on a mission to the lonely Lorelei
Some folks got a vision of a castle in the sky
And I'm left stranded, wondering why

You and me together, nothing feels so good
Even if I get a medal from my local neighborhood
I won't need a castle, they've got castles in Versailles
And I'm still stranded, wondering why

Make it a beautiful night for me
It's a beautiful night for love
A wonderful sight for lovers of love to behold

Make it a beautiful night for me
It's a beautiful night for love
A wonderful sight for lovers of love to behold

Some boat's on the ocean, we're here in this room
Seems to me the perfect way to spend an afternoon
We can look for castles, pretty castles in the sky
No more wondering, wondering why

Things can go wrong, things can go right
Things can go bump in the dead of the night
So let me be there, let me be there
Let me be there with you in the dead of the night

Make it a beautiful night for me
It's a beautiful night for love
A wonderful sight for lovers of love to behold

Yeah, it's a beautiful night
Yeah, it's a beautiful night
Yeah, beautiful night, beautiful night
It's such a beautiful night, beautiful night

Me and Race Relations

(1) I was born in North Texas in 1965. As a kid around age 5, I'd often hear my father (born in 1940 in East Texas) "playfully" recite the rhyme, "Eenie-meenie, minie-mo, catch a nigger by his toe..." My German-born mother amended this to "catch a TIGER by his toe," which is how I continued to recite the ditty whenever I had to do some picking.

(2) My father was in the Air Force and we travelled a lot. I lived in small (under-5000-people) towns primarily in Texas until I graduated from high school in 1983. From kindergarten through my senior year of high school, I had almost no black classmates. In 2nd grade in College Station, Texas (college town for Texas A&M), there were a couple of black kids -- one, Alvin, handed me a folded-up love note one time and almost ran me over with his bike another time. In 3rd grade, my family moved to an Air Force Base near Warner Robbins, Georgia, where I attended school for only a year. There, I had my very first (and only) male AND black teacher, Mr. Hand. I was kind of scared of him because he was an older, 50-something male (previously all of my teachers had been younger white women) and had a constantly very-stern expression on his face. At this Georgia AFB, maybe 1/3 of the kids in class were black. I was friends with a black girl named "Pam," who was very smart and also very athletically competitive with another black girl whose name I can't remember now. The two argued constantly about who was the fastest. One day, they had an unofficial race out on the playground and Pam came in second. Also re Pam: I remember once sanctimoniously telling my mother -- I was 8 years old, mind you: "I think one day Pam will do great things for her people." (How completely ODD! In 1973, "race relations" and "black power" certainly weren't a topic of conversation around my house. Where in the world did I get "great things for her people" from?!)

(3) The next time I thought about "black people" as a subject was when I was in 6th grade (1976) and Alex Haley's "Roots" had just been published. My parents were not getting along, and in the months prior to their divorce, my mom took me and my brother to her home country of Germany for an extended stay. Everybody in the US was talking about "Roots." And of course my East Texas father specifically FORBADE me and my mother from reading it... Guess what she and I shared a copy of on the plane...

(4) I didn't think about race relations again until I entered college at the University of Texas in '83, when I was 18. My roommate for one semester was black. There was an awkward moment when she came in the room one time after I had borrowed her "Black Boy" book by Richard Wright. I guiltily asked if she minded: "Why would I mind if you read that?" "Well, it's YOUR book!" That same semester, I was walking into my dorm, and a black couple were right ahead of me, the guy holding the door open for the girl, but me also passing through behind her. When I said "thank you" to him as a courtesy, he responded, "I was opening the door for HER, not YOU." (That made me feel horrible; what unnecessary unkindness.)

(5) For 3 years in the early '90s, I had a black woman boss at the library where I worked who was completely a great boss.

(6) When I moved to San Francisco in 1994 for grad school, I got another awakening. In a record store, there was a stand-up cut-out of country artist George Strait that someone had scribbled "FUCK U CRACKER" across the face of in black magic marker. (I didn't even know that "cracker" was still used as a term any more.) In all my years in Texas and in Austin, in all my years of going into record stores, I'd never once seen "NIGGER" written across any face. That I'd entered an Alternate Universe was made even clearer to me later in SF while I was working at a movie theater a few blocks from my apartment: Four black girls tried to sneak into a show without paying; when I stopped them, the immediate response was, "Fuck you, you frizzy-haired white bitch!" When, on another day, I stopped a group of Vietnamese teens from trying to sneak in, I got: "You're racist! You just don't want Asians here! This place hates Asians!" (Really, I just wanted them all to pay their admission. Plus the theater manager was Asian.)

SF proved constantly crazy: On the city bus one time, a young black guy got on and didn't feel like paying his dollar fare. We passengers all sat there for 10 minutes while the guy went on and on and on with the driver. A kindly fellow-passenger even went up and handed the guy a dollar, but he wouldn't take it. He just DIDN'T FEEL LIKE PAYING HIS FARE. And so we sat there. And finally the driver gave up and let the guy on.

It was a fucking bullshit-fest. This was the first time that I actually remember having a Racist Thought: "If I were back in Texas, there'd be some tough white guy on the bus who wouldn't put up with this shit and who would put this guy in his place." I consciously MISSED that "white guy" who would "set things straight." Not necessarily "white against black" but "somebody against bullshit."

(7) Another San Francisco thing, when I worked at the movie theater: During a movie break, a 30-something woman came out for popcorn and noticed that I had an accent. When she asked and I told her that I was from Texas, she "stage-whispered": "Texas is great, but there are too many MEXICANS!" What the fuck? Before coming to SF in '94, I'd lived in Austin for 10 years and in Texas as a whole all the years before, and I'd never ONCE heard anyone, ANYONE, say "There are too many Mexicans." NEVER had I heard this in any place in Texas. I only heard it once I came to San Francisco.

(8) Post-1994, things had been trolling along diffidently... Until a year or so ago (2012) in Austin, when I got on a bus heading downtown. A couple of young black guys were at the back of the bus. And they were going on and on for miles, LOUDLY, about the girl they'd fucked the night before. I finally turned around and screamed at them to SHUT UP: "No one wants to hear it!"  I then got verbal abuse, the bus-driver got verbal abuse, the guys paced up and down the aisles of the bus shouting until their stop. It was scary. (The one funny thing that the guys said to me was, "You shouldn't even be on this bus! Where's your car?")

Oh yeah -- I forgot about the two black drug dealers (Marty and Philemon) that I hung out with in Austin clubs, and sometimes spent nights with, circa '95-'96... I was completely unhappy with my life at the time, but they were both gentlemen, both very patient with and kind about my unhappiness...

Joan Crawford, Mexico City, 1966

Groovy, sexy John and Paul

Sexiest solo John song (1974 from "Walls and Bridges"):




Sexiest solo Paul song (1975 from "Venus and Mars"):

One More Kiss

This one's not to be.

I knew you for a minute...

Your heart just wasn't in it any more.

 

McCartney Paintings

Just now found and ordered this for $6 -- hardcover! A book from a small 2000 gallery show in Germany. I'm curious as to how this will turn out...

 

 

Paul Kick

For the past couple of months, I've been on a Beatles-related book kick. Books that I've bought:

Mark Lewisohn's new bio, "The Beatles: All These Years" vol. 1
Hunter Davies official bio from '68 (had only read once from library)
Peter Doggett's 2009 "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup"
A replacement for my 2nd-ever and all-time favorite Beatles book, Nicholas Schaffner's "The Beatles Forever," which was falling apart
1997 Paul bio by Barry Miles "Many Years From Now"
Fred Seaman's "The Last Days of John Lennon"
A replacement for Albert Goldman's "The Lives of John Lennon," which I once owned but had since sold
Plus another Paul bio that I've forgotten the name of and haven't received yet.

Of these, I've now read Lewisohn's (rather coldly scholarly and in-depth but not "magical" and love-inspiring like Schaffner's), Doggett's (dull, mainly about legal/money wrangling -- will most likely re-sell), Seaman's (lots of info I didn't know, but...highly depressing; despite John's public spin on his last 5 years, I found myself thinking, "Take Paul's calls! Please! Get yourself out of this horrible, mind-numbing rut where you're not interacting creatively with anyone!").

What I'm, by far, enjoying the most is the Paul bio by Miles. It's considered an "official" bio and his interviews with Paul are interspersed throughout -- in fact, probably half of the text is direct and lengthy quotations from Paul, including in-depth details of his composition of his songs, their inspiration, etc. (Similar to what Lennon did before his death in the Playboy interviews, later published as a book.) The Miles bio is over 600 pages and I'm currently only on p. 172, but I've already started underlining and flagging the most interesting passages -- it's THAT good! (If a book is just "mildly interesting" or "blah" to me, I just sit there and read it... If it's GOOD, though, I start getting inspired by stuff and wanting to remember where to re-find passages in the future.)

Here's one thing that I marked:

That creative moment when you come up with an idea is the greatest, it's the best. It's like sex. You're filled with a knowledge that you're right, which, when much of your life is filled with guilt and the knowledge that you're probably not right, is a magic moment. You actually are convinced it's right, and it's a very warm feeling that comes all over you, and for some reason it comes from the spine, through the cranium and out the mouth...

I got goosebumps reading this, remembering especially one evening over 20 years ago when, in the midst of horrible depression over a breakup, I'd managed to finish an incredible poem after messing with it for weeks... When it suddenly clicked into place, I KNEW that I had something... and actually physically got down on my knees and thanked god for it! It really WAS magical. And, though I've read lots about various writers, authors, musicians, I'd never heard the moment described as Paul described it... The "guilt" part was interesting -- Paul McCartney walking around feeling murky and unsure for "much" of his life, a feeling often only assuaged by creation?? Wha? I knew I often felt like that (about both my everyday feelings and about the clarity that art brings), but the surfacely-UNtortured McCartney??

There was another interesting thing I found. Paul mentioned picking up a women's magazine and reading an advice column where a woman asked what to do about her boyfriend, who smoked pot. Paul said:

...you're hoping the advice will be, 'Well, you know it's not that harmful; if you love him, if you talk to him about it, tell him maybe he should keep it in the garden shed or something'... But of course it was, 'No, no, all drugs are bad... Librium's good, Valium's good, ciggies are good, vodka's good. But cannabis, ooooh!' I hate that unreasoned attitude. I really can't believe it's thirty years since the sixties... It's like the future, the sixties to me, it's like it hasn't happened. I feel the sixties are about to arrive. And we're in some sort of time warp and it's still going to happen.

His "voice" is an interesting, thoughtful one. And the more I learn about him (and re-listen to his solo albums that I'm currently re-buying on CD), the more I'm reminded of Hemingway's "iceberg theory"-- how the best art reveals only 10% or so, but you the viewer/reader/listener SENSE how much more is going on below the surface...

Joan Crawford, 1962.

Just looking at her face, most any year, makes me happy.

 

Today by the elevator...

... the secretary from my department looked me over and said, "I always like how you dress. Like Mary Tyler Moore."

How HAPPY this made me! :) 

For one thing, from NYC in 2007 until just 2 years or so ago, I had about 3 black shirts and 3 white shirts and 2 pairs of flats and 2 pairs of winter boots to my name. It's only recently that I've been able to start stocking up on clothes that I actually LIKED in order to try for some kind of LOOK. And late '50s/early '60s Laura Petrie/Doris Day is EXACTLY what I like: The capri/cigarette pants, the ballet slippers.

Years ago, for whatever "pseudo-Western" event it was, I went over to my brother/sis-in-law's house with pink suede boots and a glittery hot-pink cowboy shirt. My sis-in-law commented: "I never knew you thought about fashion." My reply to her was that previously it had only been POVERTY, not any lack of  THOUGHT that had prevented me from dressing appropriately for an occasion! :)

In the meantime, I'm BASKING in the glow of being told by someone, a stranger, that I have a Laura Petrie Look! :)

 

Not Making the Grade

In the mid '80s, when I was trying to make my way at the University of Texas, I couldn't get onto the paper staff because I didn't know how to use the then-newfangled computers; and I couldn't get into the film department because there was a required tech class that involved doing something with a turntable that I tried for two semesters to figure out, but never could.

I was interested in writing for the paper, and in writing about films. I'd been the editor of my high-school newspaper, for one thing, and liked the hurly-burly intelligence of it. In state UIL competitions my junior and senior years of high school, I'd won editorial-writing and headline-writing contests. But when I got to UT, I had one interview with an editor who asked me what I read: In all honesty, I replied: "Time" magazine and "Rolling Stone." Which was, indeed, all I read as an 18-year-old in 1983. I got scorn for that. (Shades of the same scorn I would get in '94 at grad school in San Francisco when a professor asked us all who we'd read the previous summer and I replied "Norman Mailer.")

Computers aren't so newfangled nowadays, and the film department has long-since (thank god!) done away with the tech/turntable requirement for film majors interested in the screenwriting portion of the major.

I didn't pass the test back in the '80s. It still makes me sick, the look of scorn on the paper editor's face when I told him that the papers that I read included "Time" magazine. I'd always thought that was pretty debonair for newly 18-year-old me.

The Platters

Yesterday, I woke up and went to the computer, then heard some buzzing from my iPod that I'd unplugged the day before and put over to the side. What the hell? When I looked at it, it was playing "The Great Pretender" by The Platters. OK. More Platters, then, Ghost! :)

from "Adele 21" (2011)

Reading a couple of weeks ago that the best-selling British album of all time was "Queen's Greatest Hits" made me trust the country's radar for good popular music. Seriously, you can't get any better or more intelligently interesting (catchy AND intricate) pop-music-wise than a distillation of Queen.

Click here to read the whole list.

On the best-selling list after Queen came ABBA "Gold" (again, like Queen, pretty genius when it comes to crafting intelligent, interesting, intricate pop music), then the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" (a thing unto itself and part of Britain's national identity), and then Adele "21".... I understood exactly why Queen and ABBA and Beatles, but then... Adele?? Based purely on the Brits' list alone, I bought her album last week. I liked it a lot.

"Rumour Has it": "just 'cause I said it / don't mean that I meant it"

My latest books!

Thank god for Amazon, where you can buy used books for cheap. (Even back when I HAD a car and could easily drive to used book stores, the local "Half-Price Books" had already started charging half of the CURRENT price -- even if the book was a dilapidated version from 20 years earlier-- not half of the ACTUAL COVER price, as was their initial policy. They suck. Amazon does not suck. I think the entire below batch cost me under $80, despite the Hughes and the Universe books alone being over $100 had I bought them new.)  

 

Life after Death

by Ted Hughes
from "Birthday Letters," 1998

What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?

Your son's eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you -- it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.

Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.

By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots --
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.

Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.

We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay.
And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves --
All lifted their voices together
With the grey Northern pack.

The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow.

As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.

Jungry Like the Wolf

I'm decidedly not New Age-y (having no problem at all with the "archaic" concepts of  "competition" and "merit") and have never given much thought to "animal totems" or anything similar (except maybe when contemplating some of Ted Hughes's poetry and HIS exploration of animal totems). But early this morning I had a discomfiting dream in which a, specifically, white wolf played a part at the end.

I was in a big building where various groupings of people had supposedly separate living quarters, except there weren't any doors, and people kept milling about in other people's areas. I shared an area with 3 or so other girls and was trying to get some clothes together so I could go take a shower and get ready to go to a class (taught by, yes, Sandra). I REALLY felt the need for some privacy, but people from other rooms kept coming into mine/ours. And, worse, they kept coming up to me and telling me that they didn't like me! Which was merely annoying at first, but then I started to get panicky about it since the vibes were getting worse and worse. And I could not get any personal SPACE. I gave up on trying to find any clothes and on arguing with people, and wandered off to another, less populated part of the same building, where someone pointed out to me what was once Shakespeare's desk.  This area had hardwood floors and antique furnishings and far fewer (and older) people, but the few there were STILL giving me dirty looks! I kept thinking that I should find an area to live in THIS part of the building (since we all were free to sleep wherever we wanted), but ended up back in the crowded area, again trying to find some clothes to wear to the class...which by now I realized I had missed.

Completely stressed out, I now wandered outside, where there was maybe a foot of snow on the ground. Some people were milling around. Others were wearing dark clothes and sitting in a widely spaced circle. I remember thinking, "Well, it's slightly less hostile here; maybe I can just stand here and watch and not get hassled." Just then a small woman ran in my direction. I wasn't part of the circle that she was initially running around, but as she neared me, she veered from the circle and ran up to me and thrust a torch into my hand, basically saying, "You're it!" The woman was... Snooki. Yes, Snooki from "Jersey Shore." And the people in the circle were, apparently, playing some kind of "Duck, Duck, Goose" game. I absolutely did NOT want to be "it" -- I'd already felt singled out for unpleasant attention inside the building and didn't want any more attention at all -- but, for just a sec, I started to participate in the game by slowly jogging around the circle with the torch, wondering how I was going to get rid of it and just be a spectator again. I then came across Snooki again and, to me "jokingly," I put the lit end of the torch to her hair, which, of course, caught fire. I immediately helped her put the flames out, but I realized, "Geez. Now people are going to be mad at me for THIS, too."

Just then I spotted a white wolf making its laconic, but purposeful, way through the snow toward our group of people.  There was no great sense of panic amongst the humans, but we all did, nonetheless, eye the wolf and start to make our ways away from it. I pretended not to see it while walking in the opposite direction, but of course soon realized that it was following ME. I tossed the torch that I was holding straight at it, hoping either that it would think it was a treat or that it would simply be distracted by it. But the torch just fell in the snow as I walked on, knowing the wolf was still behind me. I went back into the earlier building, aware that I was being stalked, but still not overtly panicking or running. I walked upstairs and found a row of closets that I thought I could be safe in once I closed a door. But there were several dogs, including small Dobermans, in each closet. They weren't aggressive toward me, but I realized that I couldn't close any of the closet doors behind me with all of these dogs scrambling about. I was inside one closet, trying to figure out how to shut the door behind me for safety, when I turned and saw the white wolf standing right there at the doorway looking at me.

And then my alarm went off in real life. I woke up in an extreme state of alertness and attention/tension. Initially feeling very hunted by all from the dream, but as the morning wore on, I started thinking more about the white wolf. Like I said earlier, animal totems have meant nothing to me, really, nor have I spent time contemplating wolves, white or other. In conscious life, I've always thought cats, big and small, were cool in both a general way and a personal way (having had a couple of beloved cats that I felt spiritually connected to), but have never really been that interested in wolves, dogs, foxes, etc. The wolf in this dream was, indeed, following me and I was nervous about its presence, but it also wasn't 100% negative or "evil" or anything. And I was curious about why it showed up so strongly in a dream of mine when, on a conscious level, the symbol didn't mean anything to me. Interesting to learn online today about the wolf's importance in the subconscious of humans throughout history. After wading through dozens of shallow interpretations of "the wolf in dreams," I came upon this interesting, lengthy article: Jungian Archetype of the wolf...

Now, Jung I'm definitely interested in. I haven't read his works in-depth at all, yet I'm broadly/shallowly familiar with his theories on both the Archetype and the Shadow, mainly from reading more-intelligent astrologers, of all things! Here's a quote from the page:

The wolf reminded men of their domestication and their inner struggle with it. The wolf became also an image of remaining wild and sexuality, in a Jungian sense became men’s Shadow of undesired and unwanted.  For those of us with Western background do often not realize the depths and subtile differences and similarity of Pagan German or Norse,  Eastern or Native American stories. Especially wolf stories examine reincarnation, spiritual energy, gift exchange, the vitality of the body, and the spirit of the soul. In the old worldview everything is in flux and begins, balances out from, and ends with polarities akin to yin and yang. Even the gods are subject to this, undergo transformation, and often pay for what they gain with a corresponding loss. For indigenous people–including the indigenous Celts and Germanic--religion as such did not exist. Native views of spirituality wed it to time and place, land and sea and sky. Our forbears lived side by side with the wolves in an inspirited world, and that world abides, as do its instinctive but sacred dimensions:

Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered,
Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls;
Nor ever shall men each other spare….
Now do I see the earth anew
Rise all green from the waves again…

 

 

Listening to LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling on the tape...

http://deadspin.com/exclusive-the-extended-donald-sterling-tape-1568291249

is exactly, for me, like watching the scene in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," where newly separated Sydney Pollack's character loses it and physically drags his much-younger aerobics-instructor girlfriend out of a party because she's been so utterly inane. It's a highly uncomfortable thing to watch because it's so real. You feel bad for the young woman because she's just being her dumb self, but you also feel bad for the man because he's just been embarrassed in front of all of his friends. (Though, of course, it's ultimately his fault -- he shouldn't have invited her there, or even been seeing her, in the first place.)

Donald Sterling is 80 years old and separated from his equally ancient wife. Desperate for sex, he hooked up with Vanessa Stiviano (aka "Maria Vanessa Perez," "Monica Gallegos," "Maria Valdez" -- aka a girl on the make). He bought her stuff and took her out in public; in return, he got sex.

 

 

So far so good. All's fair...  Until the girl tapes a completely dumb-shit argument with him -- AFTER Stiviano's been hit with a lawsuit brought by Sterling's wife, who's pissed because her estranged husband has been giving his money away to a, basically, hooker.

 

I don't blame Stiviano for reacting to the lawsuit. Although the focus on racism is completely schewed. I don't really blame Sterling's wife for being pissed at the family-fortune giveaway, though it's an extremely odd thing to bring a suit against a husband's girlfriend on the basis of getting gifts from the straying husband.

 

The whole Sterling tape is so obviously petty and personal, between an ageing mogul and the hussy he's trying to sleep with and control, yet not control... Anyone who's ever been in a stupid lover's spat can hear that he's not racist, yet is most concerned with what his friends/minions think -- They've obviously been reporting to him that his girlfriend is "hanging out with black guys." For an 80-year-old white man, that makes him look bad. Why? Because in the Olden Days, it actually was true that only the lowest-class of white women would sleep with black men, ostensibly because they couldn't "find anybody else." That's not usually true today, and it hasn't been true for decades. But, as I learned upon reading his Wikipedia page, Donald Sterling was born in 1934. For a man born in 1934, yes, seeing "your woman" with a black man might indeed be discomfiting. (Note that Sterling specifically told Stiviano RE Magic Johnson that he admires the man and also that she could "feed him, fuck him, whatever..." -- Sterling just didn't want the IMAGE going out on Instagram. In 2014, that seems ludicrous. But, again, for a man born in 1934, it goes back to his not wanting to seem less-than in front of his friends, who had been notifying him about his girlfriend's doings.)

 



Just Wait and See

this girl will give you what you need
but it's not guaranteed
that she can be believed

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've been looking for this CD, at under $20, for over a year now! Found it!

In Praise of Jacking Off

I haven't written this ode yet.

Let me just say, though, that Saturday I woke up sooooo full of hatred for someone not paying any attention to me. I was just WALLOWING in the Hate and negativity, not getting a single one of my needs met -- emotional, intellectual, physical, you name it; I was being completely ignored.

And then I "figured out" and gave myself a little lecture: "Pent-up emotional/sexual energy? No relief in sight? That's what fantasizing/jacking off is for, you idiot!"  :)

I felt so much better after. It's amazing how sometimes fantasy can fill EXACTLY the same niche, and relax you as much, as a real-life person. (Thanks, Joan.)

It's much easier...

...to define yourself by media projections than to get along with a real-life person. A real-life person is messy. And there are numerous "down times." I'm 48, and I'm just now learning this.

Letting Go (from "Venus and Mars," 1975)

One of the sexiest Paul McCartney songs.

Love in Song (from "Venus and Mars," 1975)

Name and Address (from "London Town," 1978)

The Long Island Medium

I find the "Long Island Medium" show on TLC very peaceful to watch. (I was about to provide a link to the site, but the site was such a mess of loud, intrusive, junky ads that it completely belied my "peaceful" feeling after watching Theresa Caputo in action all day today.)

Watching the show itself, though: I'm respectful of her channeling ability. She makes me feel hopeful. After watching her, I feel that things aren't so utterly random and meaningless. I feel a connection with other souls.

And I'm an intellectual hard-ass. I hate bullshit, "feel-good" stuff based on nothing other than creepy, rah-rah "let's all feel good!" stuff that the vast majority of surface society is based on. Caputo has said herself that she's not going to channel negative energy, which I think is false, but I also understand it... (In my mind, surely the family/friends that have died violently aren't all going to be hovering there giving off sweetness and light. Yet, equally logically, they're also not going to be there in ALL hatred.) Caputo channels the positive -- i.e., the spirits from the other side saying "hi," giving her signals like numbers, tattoos, specific injuries... Stuff that Caputo herself couldn't have known but that the person that she's meeting with knows about her departed.

Given that 75% of the universe is "dark matter"/"dark energy" that even the most brilliant of physicists cannot explain... I'm quite comfortable thinking that the 75% is the energy (which cannot be created or destroyed) of those passed away.

Me, personally: I wish that the dead Ginny (my high-school love when I was 18 and she was 17) still loved me and watched over me. But she was 22 when she died, and in love with someone else at the time. I'm not sure that her spirit is wise enough to be anything to me at 48. (What does a dead 22-year-old know?) My relatives: My grandmother on my father's side was always especially nice to me when I was 8-10. And I always liked my mother's middle German sister. But what do they have to do with me? They both had others, more important to them, to think about, to visit, once dead.

Psychologically, from what I've heard, my mother's German grandfather, and my father's East Texas grandfather, might be closest to my own mind-set (intellectually curious and confrontational, and geographically restless) -- but again... what do these guys care about me?

Who is watching over me? After watching Caputo, I feel that someone must be, but... who? I am 100% alone in the material world.

A Joan Crawford Primer

In the window of Paul Stuart, NYC, 2014

Madison at 45th

 

Candid on the set with cake and ax

This is the title of something brilliant. (Below is the picture that inspired it.)

Shrieking

Last Saturday night/Sunday morning, I ended up SHRIEKING at the world. This has happened ONE time in the past 4 years since I've been back in Austin (in 2011, waiting for the bus on my way to my mother's house to drop off the birthday gifts I'd bought, after she'd made it clear that she didn't want a birthday after my brother was going out of town to party with his friends; it was about 7 in the morning; I screamed out loud at the bus-stop; once I'd dropped off her fucking presents, I cried profusely all the way back home.).

Prior to these two Austin shriekings, the last time I was howling was back in my Weehawken apartment. I lived there for 2 years (2008 to 2010), and I lost it (aka "howled") maybe twice.

Why? Utter desolation at utter isolation. Ya'd think ya'd get used to it after 30 years, huh? I think what sets it off is hints at closeness (like a mom's birthday, where you think things should be nice; or Sandra in town, needing help) --- and then the kick in the face of the ones you wanted to love you not loving you at all.

The worst part of all of this: Things might be going decently (i.e., not necessarily "great," but they're "going"; the loneliness has begun to seem "pure"). But then once you start wanting, and don't receive... your nothingness, instead of being Zen-like, feels all utterly shitty again.

Even I can be soothing

From my uncle via Facebook months ago:

"I was very happy to receive your message. I carried your baby picture in my wallet for many years until I misplaced the wallet. Four and one half years in Vietnam, your picture was in my pocket. Of course, I still love you and wish our families had not been so scattered. Hope to hear so all of us could have known and been closer to each other."

Soothing, like a forgiveness phone-call

The House is Rockin' (with Domestic Problems)

My parents divorced in late fall of '78 after my father came home drunk from a bar and then tried to shoot my mother when she wouldn't go to the bedroom with him.

Hours before, I'd watched him strutting around the house, getting ready to go out, putting on his cologne and his 70s suede "going out" jacket. This show didn't happen very often, but when it did, there was always some problem afterwards. I knew that the "suede jacket" and the "cologne" were bad news.

He came home a couple of hours later, while my mother and I were still up watching TV, demanding that my mother have sex with him. She said no. I got sent to my room. Peering out from down the hall, I saw him slap her around; at some point in their arguing, she grabbed the gold chain around his neck and tore it while falling to her knees. At that point, pissed off that his gold chain was torn, he went to the hall closet for his gun. She ran out the back door. He ran out after her. I closed my bedroom door and huddled by it, my ear pressed against it to find out what was happening.

I don't know how long I waited like that, but at some point I heard my father come back into the house. Luckily, he went straight to his bed and fell into a drunken stupor. Once I heard him snore, I crept out and went to make sure he was asleep, then went outside to look for my mother. I have a fuzzy memory of seeing her huddled in the garage and her gesturing to me to go back inside, but I'm not sure about this. At any rate, I eventually went to sleep. The next day, my father was not in the house. A day or so later, my mother told me that they were divorcing.

All of this a preface to '79, after the divorce, when my father was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Fort Worth, and my 13-year-old self and my 7-year-old brother were forced to visit him on weekends for several months before my military dad got himself transferred out of town. My brother missed his dad and didn't at all mind visiting, but I hated it. Not just hated my father, but also the whole crappy apartment and being forced to spend time with someone who had been mean to me since I was about 5. I had about 10% fond memories of him as a little kid, and the other 90% of the memories were of hate and fear. And now I had to be cooped up in a tiny apartment with him to make him feel better about losing his family... (At one point, he even showed me a classified ad he'd taken out in the Fort Worth paper: "Wish we were together, 3 and me.")

I never did anything to make him feel better about losing his family. I was glad that he'd lost all of us. (I'd always seen on TV that kids were upset when told that their parents were divorcing. When my mother came to tell me, the first thing I said was, "Thank god." While thinking, "What took you so long.")

One weekend of forced visitation, I knew that a local album-rock station was going to play the entire just-released "Dream Police" album by Cheap Trick, a band I liked, at a certain time. Dad gave me "permission" to go listen to it on his clock-radio in the bedroom. Hearing it felt like something illicit and strange. Dad kept coming in the room to see what I was "doing." (This time not getting violent with me as he had with me in his/our old home -- this time, wanting desperately to get back with my mother, he had to be on his best behavior.)

Used to own the "Dream Police" album, just recently re-purchased it for cheap as a CD. Listening to it tonight flashed me back to a very strange, unpleasant place.

What Is Life (George Harrison)

Like Dreamers Do

Written by Paul in 1957 when he was 16; recorded by the Beatles in '62 for their unsuccessful Decca audition:

Toast

I "love" (sarcastically) this KFC ad, where the mom brags about how she's usually unable to feed her family, except for toast and cereal, until KFC comes along with its cheap bucket-meal.

Ads don't go on the airwaves until they're extensively vetted. Somewhere along the line, the ad folks at KFC thought that white trash unwed mothers (the ad character makes a point of mentioning her "mate" in italics) who can't fix dinner for their kids are a great target audience.

Frank!

Austin's a college town. You get so bored with dumbly sincere college kids and their tenured professors (who have no excuse for being so dumbly PC). Here's the glam, swaggering antithesis:

"I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king..."

Other people's dreams are, for sure, boring as shit. But I just wanted to record for myself about an hour's worth of lightweight horror this early morning.

My alarm is set for 6:20 every weekday morning. Last night I went to sleep around 9:30pm, woke up around 3:30am. Lay in bed flipping channels until about 5am, when I drifted back off until the alarm.

Here's what I dreamed in that last hour-and-20-minutes:

My mom finally woke me up long past the time my alarm was supposed to go off, making me very late for work. (I have longstanding anger with her for how she, in my childhood, used to wake me vs. my brother up: She'd fling open my door and say roughly, "Get up!" Then go to my brother's room and spend at least 15 minutes sitting on the edge of his bed and stroking his hair and back until he woke up. So this dream flashed me back and made me feel tense. Plus I felt tense for being late to work -- I happen to like my current temp job a lot and don't want to be late for it.)

When I sat up and looked around, I first looked at the clock and realized that it was completely out of whack and that I didn't know how to fix it. I felt stressed about future days that I would then be late. I then looked down and saw all sorts of toads writhing around between my bed and my wall. And then my dead cat Gracie and two other stranger-cats came over to me and wanted attention. Petting them was kind of relaxing, but I was still freaked out by the toads and the broken alarm.

I then found myself in a big Victorian house that had been split into a duplex. There were frat boys living next door. And they started traipsing through my half of the house, being really rowdy. I tried locking the door that separated our halves with a latch, but it didn't work. Then all the frat boys' parents started coming to visit, entering through MY side of the house to get to the other side. I kept trying to tell them, "This is MY house! Please stop coming in here!" but nobody was listening to me. I even yelled out the front door to passers-by: "Somebody make them stop!" It was a very vibrant street scene and people stopped to look at me yelling down from my front steps, but nobody did anything to help me. At one point, some friendly German exchange students came to my front door specifically to see me, but I was so angry at everyone else, I yelled at them to get away, also.

When I went back inside, some frat boys were standing at the door dividing our halves of the house, tossing cards over into my half. Which enraged me 'til I felt like killing someone. Then the comedian "Ant" came over from the frat-half of the house -- here he was tiny, about 2 inches tall. He started griping at me about how I was acting. I picked him up and started pinching his nose and flicking at his head and doing all sorts of aggressive, nasty things to hurt him, then threw him down, leaving him for dead, like a bug.

Cut to some sort of foot-race down a hill. I thought I was doing pretty well, cutting in and out of lots of car traffic, but then a random girl that I hated, with big hair and wearing a bustier, ran ahead of me. She then turned around and faced all of us still behind her, and started to belt out a song and direct all of us. I tried to talk smack about her to my fellow runners, but no one else would judge her.

Cut back to the Victorian duplex: me and 3 guys were all trying to dress up like Frank Sinatra for a costume party. I had bobbed, waved hair, with a white shirt and jacket; the guys were dressed similarly. None of us looked particularly like Sinatra. Then Sinatra himself showed up. As in real life, he was little (at least smaller than me)-- 5'7". And his bones/frame were very fragile. He started telling me that he'd take care of everything, not to worry. And I felt incredibly relieved to have someone looking out for me after everything I'd just been through. But then I saw a black sore behind his left ear and was, again, worried and nervous...

And then my real-life alarm went off.

Damn! I intentionally went to bed early sans drinking so I'd get a good start on the next day. But instead I woke up massively, emotionally drained, worse than any hangover. The bad feeling lasted all day long. But there's always Frank.

That's life
(That's life)
That's what all the people say
You're riding high in April, shot down in May
But I know I'm gonna change that tune
When I'm back on top, back on top in June

I said that's life
(That's life)
And as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks stomping on a dream
But I don't let it, let it get me down
'Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin' around

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king
I've been up and down and over and out and I know one thing
Each time I find myself flat on my face
I pick myself up and get back in the race

That's life
(That's life)
I tell you, I can't deny it
I thought of quitting, baby but my heart just ain't gonna buy it
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king
I've been up and down and over and out and I know one thing
Each time I find myself layin' flat on my face
I just pick myself up and get back in the race

That's life
(That's life)
That's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out but my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothing shaking come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die, my, my

"I'll Meet You Halfway"

Ignore Shirley Jones and her ruffled frontis-piece (as a pre-teen watching these shows, I always wondered why in the world they stuck her in there -- completely superfluous/Linda McCartney), and the dinner-theater setting, and the smarmy guy at the front table.

The song, though, is good! :)

I wonder...

...what Americans would do if sat down en masse and told definitively that there was no "God" (aka how your parents did with the "Santa" news, except probably a good, sincere friend told you).

Yes, of course, there's "energy" abounding in the Universe. This has been proven scientifically. The "stuff" that causes everything ranging from gravity to plant growth to attraction between people, etc. But this "stuff" isn't "God." There's really not a mythological all-powerful being out there listening to your pleas (or your fervent wishes for a Red Ryder BB gun).

I'm astounded that this childish, 2000-year-old cult concept is still a constant presence in America (or anywhere else, for that matter -- what? the uneducated masses in Latin America?). It would be mildly humorous were it just a trope of the counter-culture, but... it's a mainstream thing, constantly referred to by educated politicians, etc. There's an excuse for the uneducated... but when rich, educated men in power perpetuate the myth... You've got to ask why they're doing it.

Faith No More, 1990 MTV Awards

At the time, thought this was the first step in the glorious, intense future of a rock/rap fusion. Nah. The metal guys went on to do exactly what they'd been doing since 1969. The rappers continued to sing about "bitches" and their dicks and money (soon accompanied in videos by cheesy back-up dancers a la Michael Jackson, a la "West Side Story").

The Kitty Genovese Murder: March 13, 1964

The Kitty Genovese story has always horrified me, after reading about it for years while growing up, in both newsmagazines and in college textbooks. (In my younger, wannabe-punk days, I carelessly fantasized about a band I'd be in, to be called either "Trip" or "Kitty Genovese.")

As the New York Times reported days after the March 13, 1964, attack:

"For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead."

Pre-Internet and sans any other information, I thought of the drawn-out murder as a lovers' quarrel, taking place in the courtyard of a tenement. I damned the onlookers, damned a non-caring, misogynist society in general.

As I've just learned this week, thanks to a New Yorker article upon the 50th anniversary of Genovese's death and subsequent Internet research:

No, there weren't anywhere near "38" witnesses to the murder who all ignored the attack. A neighbor yelled out the window to "Leave that girl alone!" upon first hearing screams. The killer, a stranger to Genovese, Winston Mosely, then fled. After being stabbed the first time, Genovese then tried to make her way to the hall of her apartment, then collapsed outside of it. Which is where the psychopath Mosely found her when he came back. As Mosely was stabbing her for a second time, her neighbor, a gay guy across the hall, opened the door an inch and witnessed the attack. The neighbor then retreated and called a friend, asking what he should do. (The friend advised him to get out of there -- so the neighbor crawled out his back window and didn't call the police. When later questioned by police, this guy is the source of the now-infamous quote: "I didn't want to get involved.")

Was this a mass-sociological case of "I didn't want to get involved" as the media/textbooks claimed? Nah. It was the case of one psychopath (Winston Mosely) and one coward (the gay neighbor). Other neighbors did in fact call the police and an ambulance. Genovese died in one neighbor's arms.

Some interesting things about the case that I just learned upon reading the New Yorker article and other Internet articles: Kitty Genovese was gay. She lived in her apartment with her lover. She was a 28-year-old manager at a sports bar. Her mother had insisted that the family move from Queens to Connecticut 9 years earlier after witnessing a murder, but Kitty, raised in the city, wanted to stay in NYC.

The murderer, Winston Mosely, was married with kids, gainfully employed, had been picking his victims at random. In 1968, he escaped from prison and raped a woman before being recaptured. He's still alive, incarcerated in the NY prison system. In 1977, the NY Times published his essay "Today I'm a Man Who Wants to be an Asset."

Kitty Genovese mug shot from a bookmaking arrest

Kitty Genovese at her job at Ev's 11th Hour

Queens murder site: Austin Street 1964

Austin Street 2014

Mosely's mug shot

Mosely's arrest

Mosely in 2012

The initial New York Times article.
Crime Library account.
Murderpedia photos.

Betty Who: The Ebonics of SXSW

I normally like Andy Cohen/Bravo's "Watch What Happens," on at 10pm Sun-Thurs, and this week broadcasting live from Austin's SXSW. Last night, though, I was more than a bit puzzled by the "house band" that Andy had on-set: Betty Who. The singer was way off-key. Her dancing was merely aggressively flailing, not anywhere near "charmingly clumsy." The various songs she and the band played sounded like bad remakes from 1990 (a year that was already rife with bad remakes of good mid-80s songs).

I initially thought that Andy had found some local band and was subtly making fun of Austin (as in, "ha-ha, look what the locals have to offer"). But when I looked up "Betty Who" today, I found out that this Australian singer is supposed to be a current hot commodity! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a YouTube clip from her Bravo performance last night, but here's a nearly equally bad clip of a "hit." (I understand that this is a video reference to "Flashdance" and "Desperately Seeking Susan." But to no purpose. The song is dull, the singer's facial expressions are forced and painfully uncharming (unless you're a fan of Kim Novak's acting)... And all of the desperate references to actually good mid-80s pop don't come anywhere near salvaging it.)

This Betty Who video is nearly as embarrassing as the Bravo appearance last night.

)

Directions

SXSW-ers are in town this week, and apparently I look pleasant and motherly or something, 'cause I've been getting asked for directions a lot at bus-stops and on the bus and in the 'hood.

Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I was annoyed at the annual influx of out-of-towners wearing their pants tucked into cowboy boots and their "ironic" straw cowboy hats. Now, though, outsiders seem to have calmed down a bit with the idiotic dress-up and condescension and recognize Austin as simply a music/film/tech center. (Though Andy Cohen's "Watch What Happens" on Bravo, live from Austin this week, still has stupid "Yee-haw!" cowboy graphics at the beginning of each show -- Austin has NEVER been a cowboy town, has always, since the '50s, been "alternative." And Jimmy Kimmel, also live from Austin this week, actually asked the audience last night if they'd heard of RuPaul!)

So anyway, since last Friday, I've had 4 people ask about where our bus was going and could it get them to [whatever South By event downtown]. And once I had to turn around and volunteer some info to a group of young guys who were yelling at one of their friends for supposedly getting them on the wrong bus: "Look, dude! We're heading the wrong way! We need to get off NOW!" I, being motherly as is my wont, had to calm them and say, "No, no, look, we're turning right and then we're heading back downtown..."

Today, though, I had a freaky experience with an out-of-towner: At the bus-stop from my workplace way up north, a young, dirty white woman with dreads and a whole suitcase (not just a backpack) literally PUSHED her way past me to get on the then-empty bus. She made her way to a window-seat near the back. And I then sat right behind her, in a spot that I usually like to sit in.

She turned around and said to me, "Do you HAVE to sit right behind me?"
Me: [puzzled] What?
Her: Do you have to sit RIGHT BEHIND ME?
Me: [still puzzled] What are you talking about?
Her: There are all of these empty seats. Do you HAVE TO SIT RIGHT BEHIND ME?
Me: It's a BUS! It's empty right now, but I promise you it's going to get filled up pretty soon, and there's going to be SOMEBODY sitting behind you!
Her: This is very weird.
Me: YOU are VERY WEIRD. What is your PARANOID PROBLEM?!
Her: [dramatically picks up all her heavy stuff and moves across the aisle]
Me: [dramatically taking out my reading glasses and opening up my "New Yorker" in the hopes of not appearing like a bus-freak who SITS BEHIND PEOPLE]

I was gratified to see that at the very next stop, someone else got on and sat down right in front of me without being freaked out, AND that someone else got on and sat down right BEHIND her new spot! I looked over at her to see if she recognized the IRONY, but... no reaction. (I was also gratified, about 15 minutes later, to hear her suddenly burst out with a stream of cursing directed at her suitcase. Gratified to know that it wasn't just ME...)

"Grave disfunctii sexuale," et al.



For the past several years, I've been spending about $56 for a carton of Marlboro Red Labels (formerly known as "Mediums"). I could deal with that, just barely, but...there's recently been a spate of bad cig news: The supermarket where I always shop just recently stopped selling cartons. You can still get individual packs, but they're over $6. And the pharmacy chain that for the past few months has had multiple $1-off specials on packs just announced that they'll no longer carry any cigarettes at all starting in October. 

 

And so I have finally been driven to shopping at places online for cheaper cartons of Marlboros, manufactured in places like the Philippines and Moldova. But my kind, "Red Labels" and "Mediums," apparently don't exist over yonder, so I gambled and ordered something called "Flavor Note" for, after taxes, about $33. At first I was horrified by the huge black-bordered warnings: 

 

 

(Death and sexual dysfunction await if I smoke these weird third-world cigarettes!) But then after some Internet research, I discovered that the EU had passed laws requiring these warnings on packs, so every smoker in Europe is walking around with these, not just me.

 

As for "Flavor Note": They're not bad at all. Turned out a lot milder than my "Red Labels" (I had not done any research beforehand into the comparative tar/nicotine content: Red Labels = 7 mg tar and 0.5 mg nicotine; Flavor Note = 3 mg tar and 0.2 mg nicotine). At first, I was disgruntled -- my body not being used to a different/lesser intake of tar/nicotine -- but I kept telling myself, "Look, just smoke 'em 'til they're gone; they're friggin' $3 a pack." Still, I bought myself a couple of expensive packs of Red Labels just in case I was craving one... For the past week or so, I've delved into my Red Labels only a couple of times; the rest of the time, Flavor Note has been fine. I HAVE been smoking more of them, but even when smoking 1-1/3 of a pack per day instead of 1 pack, I'm still saving a ton of money AND intaking less tar/nicotine overall.   

 

After this Flavor Note experimental carton is gone, I'm thinking of trying the European Marlboro Gold -- 6 mg tar and 0.5 mg nicotine, which is a lot closer in strength to my old Red Labels. Whatever I decide on, I've been forced into it, which pisses me off. Cigarettes costing over $6 a pack is insane, as is the refusal of my local supermarkets and drug-stores to sell cigs any more. I absolutely cannot stand this smug, PC, bandwagon, "slippery slope" of the past 20 or more years to "criminalize" smoking.

 

In the beginning, laws that banned smoking in restaurants, airplanes, movie theaters and the like were perfectly fair and reasonable. But then came the ridiculous "no smoking in bars" and "no smoking in the apartment you're paying rent for" and "no smoking on campus or city streets" and "if you're a smoker, you pay more for health insurance." Not to mention being taxed completely unreasonably.

 

Bars = They're bars. You're there to drink too much. And listen to too-loud music. And maybe pick up people. And stay up too late. They're not SUPPOSED TO BE health centers -- they're there as OUTLETS. They're there for FUN.

 

Rented apartments = You're paying WAY over cost for the space. You should be able to do anything legal there that you want to do. So what if the management company has to pay to repaint after you move out? You've more than contributed to the cost of a roomful of paint.

 

Campus/City streets = In public spaces, the rule should be: "Don't be a nuisance." Don't hang out on street corners drinking and harassing passers-by. Don't blow smoke in people's faces. Don't blast your music.

 

Health insurance = Smoking is bad for you. But so is a lot of stuff. Why, for instance, should I -- a smoker but also well within my weight range, walking over a mile a day and eating mainly non-meat -- pay more than, say, a grossly fat person who eats junk food almost every day and will probably require a lot more health-care over the years for heart and diabetes problems than I ever will? And what about the supremely fit thrill-seeker who eats vegan and bikes 10 miles every day but who also likes to sky-dive and bungee-jump? I'm 48, a smoker for 30 years, and thus far, I haven't cost the health-care system much of anything -- what, though, have we all been paying for Mr. Thrill's sprains and broken bones? You can't just randomly pick a group to discriminate against, when there are multitudes of other "risky" categories.

 

And an argument that I keep coming back to: Have you ever heard of someone smoking a carton of cigarettes and then (1) beating the wife and kids? (2) robbing a bank? (3) getting into a shoot-out with police? (4) driving and killing people?  Conversely, you CONSTANTLY hear in the news about people legally DRINKING and doing all of the above. And I'll wager that drinking causes a LOT more health problems (both mental and physical) than smoking. Yet you don't hear anyone calling for Prohibition again. Alcohol CLEARLY causes more societal problems than smoking. So why aren't there new Carrie Nation Societies forming every day for the PC crowd? Because people are group-thinkers and cowards. Being anti-smoking is an avenue for feeling smug and superior about yourself without much backlash. (I feel similarly about the anti-fur-wearing activists who don't hesitate to throw paint on old ladies' coats -- but would they dare do the same to a leather-clad biker?)